A Little Wizardry

Purcell's'Dido and Aeneas' -
recommended byROBERT ANDERSON

'... the playing is stylish and alert throughout.'

There is much that is obscure about this opera. A cheerful text survives for a prologue, but there is no music to accompany it. Many years ago Thurston Dart found Purcell music that seemed to fit the bill. I doubt whether poems by Ted Hughes, T S Eliot, and Yeats as interpreted here on stage with maximum drama by Fiona Shaw are any sort of improvement. There are other bits of music missing from the earliest sources, and this raises the question whether the performance at the Chelsea girls' school was indeed the first or the most significant...